The glamorous life of an artist... 😂
I appear to have accidentally taken a month off from updating this blog.
I'd love to tell you this was a carefully considered decision to step away from the relentless demands of modern communication.
It wasn't.
Life just got a bit... busy. 😂
You may have seen some of the photographs from FLUX on my social media.
Here is me standing beside my paintings looking remarkably clean, composed and vaguely glamorous.
(It was hot as Hades, so I'm slightly surprised my face didn't match my dress in the second photo!)
What these photograph don't show is my husband Chris and I trying to wrangle sixteen paintings to London on the train.
Sixteen.
On the train.
That's what I mean when I say “the glamorous life of an artist”. The illusion versus the reality! 😂
Thankfully, it was worth it.
FLUX was brilliant.
For four days I got to see what happens when people encounter my paintings in real life.
Sometimes I'd overhear people talking about them before they realised I was the artist. Other times people would come over and we'd end up having the most fabulous conversations about what they could see, what the paintings made them think or feel, how I'd created them and, occasionally, things they'd noticed that I hadn't.
I loved that.
And one of those conversations ended with a painting finding its new home.
You spend all this time alone in a studio creating something no-one has asked for.
Nobody is waiting for it.
You have absolutely no idea whether anyone else will ever love it the way you do.
You create it anyway.
Then one day somebody you've never met walks into an exhibition, sees it, falls completely in love and thinks, I need that on my wall.
That will never stop feeling special.
There's another bit of exhibitions like FLUX that you don't really see in the photographs.
After four days together, the artists become a sort of wee arty family... even if it's only for a few days.
You get to know each other's work, celebrate each other's sales, keep an eye on things while someone escapes for food and generally cheer each other on.
By the end you're all absolutely bloody knackered, but you're knackered together. 😂
Then everyone packs up and disappears back to their respective corners of the world.
But some of those connections stay.
And one of mine might even turn into a collaboration!
Let me introduce you to the fabulous work of Alistair Gillan, who goes by JAGILLAN.
The four pieces on the right hand side of this picture belong together. Alistair served in the Army and incorporates Morse code into his work, drawing on that part of his own history.
These four say:
TRUE LOVE RUNS DEEP
How fabulous is that?
I thought they were beautiful, slightly haunting and slightly strange. I loved the fragmentation and the way the faces seem to emerge from all those marks and then disappear back into them again.
Basically, they are exactly the sort of work that is going to make me stop and stare!
We have absolutely no idea what a collaboration might look like yet, or even when it might happen given how much we both have going on at the moment.
But we've planted the seed.
Let's see what happens. 😊
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